New film: “The Iron Lady”

Cheekbones and chidings

A new film about Margaret Thatcher will divide audiences, as its heroine did

IN AN early scene in “The Iron Lady”, Britain's former prime minister, aged and shuffling, steps out to buy a pint of milk. Ahead of Margaret Thatcher in the queue at the corner shop is a porky chap with a mobile, one of those who prospered under Thatcherism. Behind her stands a thin teenager, a nameless hoodie who would have loved a mobile and prosperity. Lady Thatcher (Meryl Streep) carefully counts out the coins, the rings that mark the conventional stages of married life, small engagement ring and narrow wedding band, now tight around her gnarled and wrinkled fingers.

Back home she prepares breakfast for her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent). She boils him an egg and chides him for spreading too much butter on his toast. “Milk's gone up: 49p a pint.” She purses her lips. It is only later, when her assistant arrives, that the viewer realises that Denis, at Lady Thatcher's side for more than half a century, now exists only in her imagination. The day has come to pack away his things. She opens his cupboard and flicks through his sombre grey suits.

Her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman) arrives to help her prepare for a dinner party, which in turn brings back the memory of another dinner party long ago. Re-examining the lady's life through flashbacks is a clever move by the film's director, Phyllida Lloyd. The audience sees the young Margaret scrambling back up from the cellar during a wartime air raid to cover up the butter dish in the kitchen; watching her father, Alfred Roberts (Iain Glen), in full flow at a town hall meeting; hearing the news that she has won a place at Oxford University. Eventually her political career takes off.

Ms Streep is, of course, the real star here: the voice silvery, the hair and skin perfect, the hand on the cabinet tiller as steady as the finger she gave the Argentines in the run-up to the Falklands war. To the core, she is devoted, loyal, steadfast. Never have cheekbones been so sharp a metaphor for granite tenacity.

Thatcher loyalists are outraged that their heroine should be portrayed as decrepit, on the brink of dementia. They miss the point. As a politician, Margaret Thatcher was a study in reinvention. This film is just the latest buffing. Like “The King's Speech” and “The Queen” before it, “The Iron Lady” is a shining example of a popular British genre: the biopic as conservative propaganda.